Government Departments: Smoking

Lord Laird: To ask Her Majesty's Government what arrangements there are for officials of the Department for Education who smoke during office hours.

Lord Hill of Oareford: The department provides small external shelters for smokers at its Runcorn and Darlington sites. On all other sites staff who smoke are encouraged to do so at a reasonable distance from entrances to the buildings.
	Staff who smoke during office hours must do so in their own time.

Schools: Academies

Lord Hoyle: To ask Her Majesty's Government what information they have received on the consultation exercise carried out by the directors of the proposed Chorley Sixth Form and Career Academy.

Lord Hill of Oareford: The academy trust of the proposed Chorley Career and Sixth Form Academy provided the Department for Education with regular updates about the progress of its consultation, which ran from Wednesday 7 March to Friday 27 April. It received a range of responses to the proposal to establish a new secondary school and sixth form in Chorley which was reflected in the consultation report it provided to the department in May. As a result of a rigorous continued assessment of all free school proposals, we have since decided to withdraw the project as the plans for the school had not progressed sufficiently for it to proceed to opening.

Schools: Teaching

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress has been made in implementing the commitment set out in paragraph 6.9 of The Importance of Teaching White Paper regarding common performance measures for education for 16-19 year-olds.

Lord Hill of Oareford: We remain committed to introducing comparable measures of performance for all 16-19 providers of education. We are considering what these measures should be in order to ensure that comparisons are made on the right basis.

Unemployment

Lord Laird: To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will discuss with the Office for National Statistics changing the question in the Labour Force Survey measuring numbers of persons out of work, which currently reads "were you looking for any kind of paid work at any time in the past four weeks" to one which qualifies the paid work sought as full-time, to take account of students; and how many students are currently counted as jobless.

Lord Freud: It is already possible to account for students in the Labour Force Survey without changing the question on looking for paid work. The Department for Work and Pensions has previously discussed with ONS the issue of students who are classed as unemployed under International Labour Organisation (ILO) definitions, and prominence is given to separately identifying this group both in table 14 of its monthly Labour Market Statistics bulletin and in the accompanying commentary. Latest figures show that of all ILO unemployed 16 to 24 year-olds in February to April 2012, 305,000 are full-time students and 709,000 are not in full-time education.